James Rovira on The Joker . . . Plus my Extrapolations

James Rovira

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In reflecting on all three Batman films by Christopher Nolan, I had wondered about the absence of the Joker in the third film. I know of course that the actor who played the Joker is dead, so that particular version of the Joker could not easily return, but what happened to the Joker, after all? Wouldn't he have been in that prison whose inmates were liberated by Bane? Or was he imprisoned far away from Gotham City? Well, the Blake (and Milton!) scholar James Rovira offers an explanation, namely, that the violence carried out by the Joker is there all along, in all three films, not because the Joker is personally behind it but because the point of the violence is destruction for the sake of destruction:

I think we need to get this point to really understand these films, perhaps then understanding why the character of the Joker -- who personifies chaotic and random destructive force following nihilistic impulsiveness -- was necessarily central to the trilogy. The Joker, as far as plot development is concerned, was irrelevant to the plot line that was established in the first film and then completed in the third film. His presence does not follow directly from the events of the first film and is unnecessary to any of the action that takes place in the third film. Keep in mind that the material in the second film essential to the third film -- Dent's corruption, death, and then the lie told about it -- could have been set up on any variety of pretexts. These events could have been developed in less time at the end of the first film, excluding any need for the second film altogether. But thematically, the Joker exists at the center of the trilogy. He embodies the reason why we must not attempt to politicize the evil criminality that runs through Nolan's Batman trilogy from beginning to end. The Joker reveals its true nature by revealing that the pretexts for destruction are equally interchangeable and equally pointless regardless of their supporting political rhetoric. Only the destruction itself matters. (James Rovira, "The Dark Knight Rises," James Rovira: What I'm Thinking. What I'm Doing, July 27, 2012)

This doesn't actually respond to my question, but I never asked Mr. Rovira directly, anyway, and the analysis is interesting to consider. I don't entirely agree with this view, for I think that politics and religion in the films are about more than destruction for destruction's sake. But I like Rovira's analysis of the Joker's significance, and what I would suggest is that he represents the logical extension of violence carried out for destructive judgment when that judgment lacks the quality of mercy, for then must everything suffer destruction, such that Bane, as the most extreme member of the shadowy League of Shadows, may speak of liberation -- whether political or religious -- but he intends only willful destruction. Rovira cites Hegel in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right for explicating the significance of willful violence:

If it [the will abstracted from intellect, or what Hegel calls "the freedom of the void"] turns to actuality, it becomes in the realm of both politics and religion the fanaticism of destruction, eliminating all individuals regarded as suspect by a given order, and annihilating any organization which attempts to rise up anew. Only in destroying something does this negative will have a feeling of its own existence [Dasein]. It may well believe that it wills some positive condition, for instance the condition of universal equality of or universal religious life, but it does not in fact will the positive actuality of this condition, for this at once gives rise to some kind of order, a particularization both of institutions and of individuals; but it is precisely through the annihilation of particularity and of objective determination that the self-consciousness of this negative freedom arises. Thus, whatever such freedom believes that it wills can in itself be no more than an abstract representation, and its actualization can only be the fury of destruction. (cf. here)

If Rovira is right, and his analysis is intriguing, then Bane is the devotee of a willful deity, a deity who promises mercy but provides none, a deity who visits only destruction upon the world and is capable of destroying the world in an instant and recreating it in an instant merely for the willful pleasure of destroying it in the next instant, an evil occasionalist deity whose followers are created in his image in their destructive willfulness absent of reason.

Not that Nolan saw quite so far as this, but we hermeneuts can extrapolate to this uber-cosmic joker of a deity . . .

Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas?

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(Image from Wikipedia)

In David Mitchell's story "An Orison of Sonmi-451," from Cloud Atlas, the ascended fabricant Sonmi -- i.e., a genetically engineered slave who attains self-consciousness -- had escaped and joined the revolutionaries aiming to overthrow the state (i.e., corpocracy), but has been recaptured and subjected to an interrogation, leading to this suggestive exchange:

What damage could even 10 million -- say -- ascended fabricants inflict on the most stable state pyramid in the history of civilization?
Who could work factory lines? Process sewage? Feed fish farms? Xtract oil and coal? Stoke reactors? Construct buildings? Serve in dineries? Xtinguish fires? Man the cordon? Fill exxon tanks? Lift, dig, pull, push? Sow, harvest? Now do you begin to see? Purebloods no longer possess these core skills upon which our corpocracy, or any society, rests. The real question is, what damage could 6 million ascensions not inflict, in combination with cordonlanders and downstrata purebloods such as those in Huamdonggil with nothing to lose? (Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, Random House, 2004, pages 326-327)

This reversal of roles between the pureblood masters and their fabricant slaves reminds me of the master-slave dialectic in Hegel's 1807 work, Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes). Look at the original German (and its translation) of Section 193 in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: Selections, edited by Howard P. Kainz (Penn State Press, 1994), pages 61-62:

Die Wahrheit des selbstständigen Bewußtseyns ist demnach das knechtische Bewußtseyn. Dieses erscheint zwar zunächst außer sich und nicht als die Wahrheit des Selbstbewußtseyn. Aber wie die Herrschaft zeigte, daß ihr Wesen das Verkehrte dessen ist, was sie seyn will, so wird auch wohl die Knechtschaft vielmehr in ihrer Vollbringung zum Gegenteile dessen werden, was sie unmittelbar ist; sie wird als in sich zurückgedrängtes Bewußtseyn in sich gehen, und zur wahren Selbstständigkeit sich umkehren.

The truth of the independent consciousness is consequently the servile consciousness! Of course the servile consciousness comes on the scene at first as alienated from itself, and not as the truth of Self-Consciousness. But just as the case of the Master has demonstrated that its essential characteristics are the exact opposite of what was intended, so also will Slavery in its development turn out to be the opposite of that which it is in its immediacy. Slavery, as a consciousness-forced-back-on-itself, will come to itself and convert itself into true independence.

This is what Sonmi has done. She has transformed her slave mentality into true independence through recognizing that the slaves of the fascist society known as "corpocracy" have, in effect, become the actual masters, for the pureblood 'masters' no longer possess the skills upon which any society rests, these skills now being possessed by the fabricants. Mitchell has apparently read Hegel . . . or at least his epigone, Marx.

By the way, Huamdonggil (Huam-dong-gil, 후암동길) is a neighborhood in Seoul -- "dong" (동, 洞) meaning something like "neighborhood" and "gil" (길) meaning "street." It's one of Yongsan-gu's administrative divisions. Keep in mind that the story "An Orison of Sonmi-451" takes place in Nea So Copros, a futuristic, dystopian version of a reunified Korea.

The actual, present-day Korean society, of course, isn't made up of Korean 'purebloods' who run things and non-Korean 'fabricants' who do the real work -- despite the many foreign laborers now residing in Korea doing the "dangerous, dirty, distant, difficult" work and even if Mitchell could possibly be punning in irony on the word for "factory" in other languages, such as German (der Fabrik) or French (la fabrique).

Right?